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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
29
Mixed:
12
Negative:
0
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Critic Reviews
Sep 17, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The characters played by Mr. Farrell and Ms. Milioti are not just entertaining adversaries. They are dynamic, dramatic and emotional complements to each other. As are the performances. .... That tactic [callous cruelty and casual brutality], combined with the convolutions and convulsions of a nonstop thriller, also makes "The Penguin" epic television.
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Sep 19, 2024
Season 1 Review:
“The Penguin” exerts an unusually confident grip. It’s a velvety, acidic reminder of how so many underworld tropes can be revived, and made exciting, with the right collaborators working as one, and the right actors taking the job seriously without treating it like holy writ or solemnity bordering on bloody sanctimony.
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Sep 17, 2024
TV Guide MagazineOct 4, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Eight lurid and viscerally exciting episodes. .... Farrell immerses himself in this role with a steely absorption reminiscent of De Niro. [7 - 27 Oct 2024, p.6]
iSep 20, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Fans of the DC characters might choose to view this eight-episode spin-off as the origin story of the Penguin and his journey from mobster to monster. Others can watch it simply as a dark, gritty, gripping crime drama, the enjoyment of which requires no knowledge of Batman lore. It works as both.
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Sep 19, 2024
Season 1 Review:
“The Penguin” stays interesting thanks largely to a litany of episode-ending cliffhangers and its female characters, Cobb adversary and former Arkham Asylum patient Sofia Falcone (Cristin Milioti, stealing many scenes) and Cobb’s mother, Francis (Deirdre O’Connell, “One Dollar”), who gives off Livia Soprano vibes.
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Sep 18, 2024
Season 1 Review:
He [Farrell] gives an endlessly compelling performance, well matched by his co-stars—particularly O’Connell, Milioti, and an underused Carmen Ejogo as Oz’s sorta girlfriend. They all richly inhabit the show’s well-articulated version of Gotham, a morass of tribes and cultures scrambling to survive amid the entropy of all things.
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RogerEbert.comSep 18, 2024
The PlaylistSep 17, 2024
Season 1 Review:
“The Penguin” doesn’t overplay its hand enough to go broke, mind you, but it does undercut itself slightly with just a few too many meandering moments. Still, in terms of superhero-centric franchise TV, it’s arguably among some of the best viewers have been offered to date.
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Sep 19, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Director Craig Zobel has done a fine enough job of recreating the basic look of The Batman, all grainy sunlight and amber streetlights, but the show itself is so disinterested in anything to do with its source material that the connection feels largely academic. (There’s little of the brooding, noir-esque sensibility that lent the film its unique identity amongst the Bat-flicks; Oz’s troubles aren’t half as operatic as Bruce Wayne’s.) Farrell and Milioti remain compelling, but if—as the show promises—The Penguin is on the rise, we can’t quite grasp that trajectory just yet.
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Sep 19, 2024
Season 1 Review:
There is a fine line between grisly storytelling that is compelling and plots so depressing (and sometimes boring) you want to turn off the TV. "Penguin" jumps back and forth over the line for the eight-episode season. Still, it's hard to keep your eyes off Farrell. He is committed to the role, to say the least. He might make you worried if you don't watch.
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Sep 17, 2024
Season 1 Review:
There’s no reason this needs to be eight episodes. The good would have been more concentrated, more powerful, in fewer. The diversions could have been eliminated. Farrell plays Oz like a dumber, more desperate Tony Soprano. That’s better in small doses. Only when Milioti’s Sofia is mixed into the equation does “The Penguin” really soar.
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Sep 16, 2024
Season 1 Review:
The writing isn't particularly deep, falling back on mob genre archetypes. While the tangle of feuds and double-crosses build to a strong finale, I spent much of the show's runtime covertly waiting for Sofia Falcone to come back on screen — which isn't exactly a good sign for the Penguin's impact as a protagonist.
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Sep 19, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Every character in Gotham City besides the Penguin, Sofia and Cobb’s mother is paper-thin (that unfortunately includes Vic, Cobb’s destitute sidekick, who doubles as his main interlocutor). If, on the other hand, “The Penguin” sticks to just this one season, I’d call it interesting but imperfect. The finale feels like a cliffhanger, not a conclusion, and the show’s boldest experiment (in genre terms) is just getting off the ground.
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The IndependentSep 12, 2024
SlashfilmSep 12, 2024
Season 1 Review:
If "The Penguin" is worth watching at all, it's to see the lead performances from Farrell and Milioti, whose Sofia is more or the less the co-lead character. Even when the story they're stuck in lets them down, these two performers rise to the challenge and do exemplary work.
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The TelegraphSep 12, 2024
Sep 18, 2024
Season 1 Review:
You must be content with a standard-issue mob turf war TV series, with thick overtones of "The Sopranos," as heavy and as gloppily applied as all that clay weighing down Farrell. This "Penguin" is a proximate real world, and not even a slightly heightened version of one, with no Batman and no fantasy world to escape to — or for it to escape to.
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Sep 17, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Oz’s prosthetics fit The Batman’s exaggeratedly gothic aesthetic to a tee, but they sometimes come off as a goofy intrusion in the otherwise realistic world of The Penguin. And there was an air of mystery and moral ambiguity to the shadow-lurking schemer Farrell played in the film. But as we watch him grunt his way through eight episodes of this series, that mystique quickly fades and he becomes just another player in just another run-of-the-mill mob story.
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Sep 20, 2024
Season 1 Review:
So while there are few if any real surprises, there are jolts, violent plot turns designed to shock and to deepen the emotional stakes. In the bleak, shallow context of the story, they play less as tragedy than as an off-putting moral vacuity. .... [Farrell] gives a modulated, fully committed, entirely professional performance. But it’s not a Colin Farrell performance. Adopting a grating New York-ish accent, he does a meticulous job of channeling gangster icons like De Niro, Pacino and Gandolfini.
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Sep 19, 2024
Season 1 Review:
Milioti’s performance and agile, noir-tinged directing from talented collaborators like filmmaker Craig Zobel (Z for Zachariah, Compliance) and TV veteran Helen Shaver (Station Eleven, Maid) aside, its greatest asset is the utter ferocity of LeFranc’s finale. But without the moral nuance that made The Sopranos so ripe for rumination and debate, getting there is a slog, weighed down by broad characters spewing comic-book dialogue.
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